Flowing down the Magical River

Hello everyone!

So when it comes to learning more about magic, we tend to look to the professional players for insight and guidence on everything from what deck to play to what card is the best first pick out of any pack. Every once and a while I will hear of someone who has been playing since the inception of magic talk about how he remembers back when there was nothing except for a monthly "The Duelist" magazine to read and learn more about magic from. Also, there was no price guides except for the monthly "Scrye" magazine, which naturally was always outdated. It's been called the Wild West days of magic.

Nowadays information is absolutely viral. Articles, like this one, are the most traditional form of strategy guides, however over the past couple years videos have been getting more and more popular. When ChannelFireball started a couple years ago, their angle (besides having LSV) was that they were going to have lots of MTGO videos for a new way of learning about magic.

Since then the idea has grown and spread across to all major websites and you can now expect to get videos every day! Drafting, Standard, Modern, and Legacy are all covered! I too would make videos, but I don't know what software is required to make them.... In addition to videos, there are even podcasts that you can listen to passively and pick up unique little nuggets of information from.

So you would think that there isn't many other places to go, right? No! In fact, there is a new realm of strategy "articles" that is very quickly becoming more and more popular, and that is streaming!

Streaming basically is when someone sets up a camera to display their computer screen and play it out live online. The most popular website to stream on is twitch, and now that I think about it I honestly don't know any other websites that you can stream on.... GGS Live is used by Wizards and and Star City to stream their events, but I don't think you can stream your MTGO games on it.... Regardless, there are a few notable players who do stream like AJ Sacher, Brian Kibler, Tom Martel, and Brad Nelson.

AJ seems to stream almost every night, and the others also stream very frequently. Over the past month, I have seen the popularity of the streams increase dramatically as you can see there are often 250-350 people watching them each time. Watching the stream is awesome because there's a chat next to the video so you can interact with the person streaming in addition to discussing the best next play. Also, it feels cool getting to chat with your pro player of choice between rounds.

Last night, Brad Nelson and Tom Martel were both streaming the same 8-4 draft at the same time, and they had a bet saying whoever didn't get as far in that draft would have to stream an M12 draft. To complete the irony, they actually played against eachoter round 1! So I put both streams on at the same time and left both soudns on. They each primarily talked only on their turn, so they never really talked over eachother too, so it was awesome getting to see how they each were thinking and playing around the other's stuff (and acurately reading the other's tells!). In the end Tom Martel won 2-1, but I had to get some sleep before Nelson cashed in on the bet.

There is a dark side to streaming though, and that is called ghosting. Ghosting is when you play against someone who yo know is streaming, so you watch their stream and see what is in their hand. From time to time you will see someone play around things or make attacks they normally wouldn't unless they were ghosting and they tend to get called out. Don't be that guy - don't ghost.

All in all, Streaming is awesome because its a different way to consume magic without actually playing it that does have a different feel from just watching traditional videos or reading articles. They are different every day, and are almost always accessible in the evening.

That's all I have for today! Until next time, stay classy!

Ryan Lackie
Ryan.Lackie92@gmail.com
@ThingsILack
ThingsILack on mtgo

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